Nicolas Cage Arrested – the Inside Story

Nicolas Cage made a big scene in the Big Easy when he was arrested Saturday morning.

“He was running around and screaming in the street,” a bartender at Harry’s Corner in New Orleans, tells PEOPLE.

The Academy Award-winning actor, 47, who is filming a movie in the area, was charged with domestic abuse and disturbing the peace after arguing with his wife, Alice Kim, according to the New Orleans Police Department.

The couple were fighting over which house they were renting in the French Quarter, and Peter Bennett, a local street performer who lives near the property, tells PEOPLE he came home to two cop cars on each end of his block.

“Apparently he had mistaken the house of my neighbors for the other house up the block that he is actually renting,” he says. “His wife was trying to persuade him from disturbing the elderly couple who do in fact live in that house.”

Cage is actually renting a house three doors down, according to Bennett. When cops arrived, the bartender says the actor started to get into the back passenger-side door of the police car.

“But the cop got out, walked around, and Cage ran a block south toward the river, where he tried to get into a cab,” he says. “There was a woman outside with a baby in her arms shouting, ‘Please don’t hurt us.’ ”

Cage, who was arrested after a police officer ordered him out of the cab, seemed to be intoxicated, according to an inmate, who says he was in the holding area of the jail with the actor.

“He was drunk,” the inmate tells PEOPLE, adding that Cage spent the evening chatting with sheriff’s deputies. “He wasn’t in a cell. He was behind the counter with all the other officers.”

No one answered the door of the Cage property on Saturday evening, and a rep for the actor had no comment.

The actor was eventually bailed out of jail by Dog the Bounty Hunter, and Cage is due in court on May 31.